$240/yr is too much for simple hosting- a small artist can get that for free these days, especially if they don't need DRM. For the price you'd expect promotion and discovery.

It's not just the web hosting it's the whole trusted vendor you already have an account with.

Yes, you can get that for cheaper, but then you're not the customer you're the product.

If you tried rolling your own solution you'd be paying more than 20$ per month.

I pay $0 a month to host a website. A number of artists I've bought from have you pay with paypal and a download link is included on your receipt. That's what, nine cents per transaction plus five percent, and minimal egress charges from a cloud provider.

Hosting costs money and you're getting that for free, so there's something else going on there.

You're paying for PayPal on their margin.

> so there's something else going on there

Cloudflare free tier as a CDN. They're on the record about why they do it- mainly, it generates large sales leads, makes it easier to hire, and provides them a community of willing QA testers for new features.

Hosting costs for a small website are literally pennies a month if your content can be cached. Plenty of truly free origin hosts available. GitHub Pages is a popular ine.

> You're paying for PayPal on their margin

So? Bandcamp charges 15% for small artists.

Right, so Cloudflare makes their money one way or another. If at some point they decide it's not worth it to host free content anymore then you're out of luck.

That's what I mean, there is a cost of doing business and someone has to pay it. It sounds like Bandcamp was a shitty partner too, but the larger point still stands I think.